'The Green Knight'

How can you possibly take a 14th-century epic poem, written in Olde English, with such lines as "Be so bolde in his blod, brayn in his hede, pat dar stifly strike a stroke for an ober,'' and translate it to 21st-century cinema screens? For David Lowery, you start with an obsession for all things King Arthur, in particular the poem -- "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"-- from a very early age, and then produce a singular work that evokes the oddity of the poem's tangled soul's journey in delightfully prescient ways.

Lowery, an adroit filmmaker, whose highly attuned atmospheric sensibilities were eerily present in previous efforts such as "Ain't Them Bodies Saints," and "A Ghost Story," has applied his exacting aesthetic to the Arthurian legend, and come out with something that feels almost impossibly in line with the original poem -- save for "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" element that boosters the thematic tensions -- both the journey's perilous trevails, but also in the act of reading such a work in the first place.

We meet young Gawain (Dev Patel), son of the sister (Sarita Choudhury) of the King (Sean Harris), as he is still striving to become a knight in the famous Round Table (an interesting conceit Lowery adds: He never actually names Arthur or his sword, Excalibur). He spends much of his ample free time hanging about in pubs, and whorehouses, where he takes up with Essel (Alicia Vikander), and idles his time in drink and womanizing.

But one Christmas evening, as the knights are all gathered for the revelry of a feast with their king, their celebrations are interrupted by the unexpected appearance of the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), a giant-size creature, astride his equally large horse. Sliding off the saddle, with an enormous battleaxe in his hand, the Knight proposes a "game," a challenge of sorts to all he stands before: If one of Arthur's knights were to stand up and strike him with their sword, in any manner of their choosing, the Green Knight would accept the blow without flinching, but whoever takes this swing shall have to agree to meet him a year hence, at the "Green Chapel" some days' travel north, and allow him to retaliate in kind.

With no one else jumping to take the challenge from this giant, Gawain stands up and agrees to the terms. Taking Excalibur from Arthur's hand, he strikes the Knight, and beheads him, only for the disembodied head to repeat the terms of their agreement, and then, with his body cradling his detached cranium, ride back out of the castle, cackling as he goes.

What begins then is a sort of prototypical hero's journey for Gawain, who spends his year all too frivolously, leading up to his departure. Along his eventual sojourn up north, among other things, he runs into a group of young brigands, led by a cherubic-faced boy (Barry Keoghan), who jump him, and leave with his horse, much of his gear, and all of his money; befriends a fox, who follows him along the way; restores the severed skull to the body of a young, ghostly maiden (Erin Kellyman); and is eventually held up close to his journey's end, at the peculiar castle of a lord (Joel Edgerton) and lady (Vikander, again), who seem determined to keep him from fulfilling his word and securing his honor.

There's a smokey sort of claustrophobia to the visuals, as DP Andrew Droz Palermo, lays on the filters, and often closes down the camera's focal length to push everything beyond the primary foreground into a slurry, all of which evokes the idea of early German Expressionist films -- like something out of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" -- where the sets were peculiarly theatrical and intensely alienating. Transitions are often murky and unclear, camera angles are unhinged, and everything feels draped in fog, which works in harmony with the extensive sound design (when the Green Knight moves, it's as if giant tree trunks are being dragged across one another), to give the whole enterprise its otherworldly keen.

Scenes shot inside a castle chamber feel closed off from the rest of the world, as if all existence beyond what we see is nothing but shimmering mist. Even once outside, as Gawain makes his way out of town, there's the peculiar sense of affected fabrication, as if even the land around him is a construct. The film was primarily shot in Ireland, but rather than use the land's natural landscape to heighten the sense of reality, Lowery cannily goes the other direction, creating a visual representation of the very tone of the poem itself, and its difficult line interpretation. In one shot, after a half-dead Gawain arrives at the castle of the lord and lady near the end of his journey, we look down on him as he sleeps upon a resplendent bed from high above, the velvet drapery extending up far beyond the bedframe to the level of the camera, as if the knight-to-be is lying at the bottom of a deep, grandly appointed, well.

Despite the visual poetics, the performances of the actors are rooted in a recognizable emotional timbre. Patel, earnest, and well-meaning, but terribly callow and unworldly, presents a figure caught between the moment of his careless youth, and his possible grand future, with all possibilities in-between laid out before him as if different suits laid upon a bed.

The effect is certainly dreamy, but not in the typical sense of the term, where things are sweetly ethereal and joyous. Instead, it evokes a kind of sinister dream logic, paired with intense visual styling, to set the atmospheric mood. It's definitely not for everyone -- despite its dramatic title, it's anything but superhero fare -- but it's also precisely the sort of jolt the summer onslaught of films, depressingly craven up to this point, so badly needs.